


In Sunlight

by Slyboots



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Flash Fic, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Minor Canonical Character(s), Post-Canon, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-02 04:52:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5234846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyboots/pseuds/Slyboots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Eileen wants to stay. It does not occur to him to stop her."</p>
<p>Henry rebuilds his life. There is not much to rebuild.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Sunlight

**Author's Note:**

> Post-Mother ending.

i.

He is plaster dust and horsehair, the tepid smell of old dirt. He is a hole in the air.

Light filters through him, leaving no trace.

After a few minutes it occurs to him that he is breathing.  


ii.

He gets up. Mother exhales a long and loving sigh.

He rebuilds.  


iii.

Eileen wants to stay. It does not occur to him to stop her.

Her smile is bright and vague, and sunlight reflects in her eyes and leaves no mark.

Sunlight--the first they have seen.

In sunlight she looks almost beautiful. In sunlight she could be anyone. He has not seen her in sunlight for many, many days.

She will not speak to him again, after this is over--this he knows instinctively, and he is surprised-unsurprised to know it.

Eileen is good, and kind, and honest. He does not begrudge her this.

“I’ll help you out,” he says, to fill the silence. Silence is a cavity, abscessed and warm. Silence will swallow them both up.  


iv.

They talk a little in the days to come. Simple things. Good, honest things.

She is twenty-three. She studied archaeology in college.

He knows these things, and he does not say so.

She was born in Minnesota. Before “all this,” she never wanted to go back.

He did not know these things, and accepts them without a word. They do not belong to the Eileen he knows--a frightened woman, skin hot-musky-sick with loathing.  


v.

He still sees them.

He is unsurprised by this, too.

It never occurred to him that it would stop.  


vi.

A dead woman passes him in the subway. Her teeth are white pebbles in her lake-mud face. She stinks of fish bursting in sunlight.

Her smell follows him home. He collapses, choking, into bed.

_I’m always watching you._

vii.

Her name was Sharon Blake.

It is not his duty to remember her. Hs duty was discharged in clean and stinking rooms, in a world brighter than daylight.

It is not his duty.  
He learns her name. He learns them all, like catechism. Henry pieces through old photographs, through tabloid clippings, through someone else’s memory.

He does not resent them.  


viii.

Mother hums around him. A fly hammers itself to death against the lightbulb.

It smells like Jasper.  


ix.

Eileen screams in the night, guttural and wet. He imagines her thrashing, frothing.

The hole never closed. Its edges smell faintly. Afterbirth, he guesses.

They line up behind him, silent, and listen with him. He cannot quite see their faces.

He counts them as he counts her yells: one, two, twenty.

There were supposed to be nineteen, he thinks, as if it means nothing.

He counts again. Eileen screams.  


x.

“Eileen.”

She fights him off, damp and stiff with sleep. This is familiar.  


xi.

“I think,” she says the next morning, “I want my key back.” She smiles. It is not personal.

He accepts this.  


xii.

Andrew DeSalvo floats face-up in his bathtub. Andrew’s flesh is cheesy and white. His face is recognizable.

Henry runs the water, and Andrew bobs, mouth working, thudding against the sides of the tub like something solid.

For two days Henry does not bathe. On the third day, he knocks on Eileen’s door.

She lets him in--”just for this, okay?”

Andrew is still there when Henry returns. Sharon stands over him, leaking through her dress. As he enters, her head turns, and black water sprays the floor.

He abandons the bathroom as a lost cause.

xiii.  
He thinks about moving.

xiv.

Peter Walls gibbers to himself in a sepulchral concrete park. He is sixteen. One of his sneakers is missing.  
  
“I know who you are,” Henry tells him one day. Peter eyes him, twisting back. His vertebrae pop. Peter’s neck is broken.  
  
“Can you talk?” says Henry another day.  
  
Peter grins slackly. His bones bend. He twists in place, laughing.  
  
Some days Henry sits with him. Peter is talkative enough.

xv.

HENRY IT HURTS.  
  
HENRY. HENRY. HEY MOTHERFUCKER.  
  
GOD I SAW GOD I SAW GOD I SAW  
  
SEE YOU  
  
His white lips do not move. Words come out.  
  
I SAW

xvi.

He cannot get rid of the apartment.

There are six months to go on his lease. He thinks he will renew when the time comes.

Peter and Sharon approve. Peter gibbers, bones snapping and crackling, and Sharon watches him and smiles like a mother.

xvii.

Eileen smiles at him in the hallways, placid and chill. She does not resent him.

xviii.  
Henry vomits in his sink. Sharon holds his hair with fingers spongy.  
  
“Kill,” says Joseph from behind him.  
  
Henry does not argue.

xix.

He does not leave the apartment much.

xx.

Eileen Galvin moves out in January. Through the wall he hears her go.

“Kill,” says Joseph.

Henry is too tired to argue.  


xxi.

Henry places his thumbs on his closed eyes. Another fly is burning; the Jasper-smell coats his teeth and tongue.  
  
Andrew thuds and sloshes behind the closed bathroom door. Sharon stands nearby in insinuating silence. Peter yammers weakly; unseeing Henry knows his bones are bending like chewing gum.

“Kill,” says Joseph, like catechism.  
  
The others, the ones he cannot bear to see, crowd around him. Their curiosity is blank, cottony, thick as the air choking him.  
  
Henry jabs his thumbs deep and scoops. Once. Twice.  
  
They crowd in, and he might as well be dead, he might as well--

He breathes, blood hot and clean on his cheeks. Life goes on.


End file.
